The author erroneously focuses on Snapchat as a service and university administration, monitoring and censorship; it is a basic issue of education. Educating the Millennials and Gen Z about privacy, netiquette and digital humanity.

Education is about letting students explore, fail, learn from their failure and improve. #FinlandPhenomenon

Temporary Messages, Lasting Impact

Still trying to understand the academy’s apparent obsession with monitoring and controlling/influencing every possible aspect of student and faculty behavior, on and off campus. Sometimes I can’t decide if it’s kind of a Stalinist control thing, a guy in the back of a windowless van thing, or some kind of extension of a juvenile obsession with everyone’s behavior but your own. That someone complains does not automatically suggest that someone must “do something,” particularly when “doing something” is often prohibited by law to begin with (in the case of administrators and the university).

A password manager stores the passwords for your various online accounts and profiles and saves you from having to remember and enter each one each time you visit a password-protected site. Instead, your passwords are encrypted and held by your password manager, which you then protect with a master password. Since you are saved from having to remember all of your passwords, you will be less tempted by the dangerously poor idea of using the same password for all of your accounts. With a password manager, you can create strong passwords for all of your accounts and keep all of those passwords saved behind a stronger master password, leaving you to remember but a single password.

With PasswordBox, you can sign up for an account via its mobile app or the PasswordBox website on a computer. I chose the latter and downloaded PasswordBox from its website, which turned out to be a browser extension.

danah boyd, a professor at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, argues that teenagers closely scrutinize what they share online because it is a way for them to negotiate their changing identities. In her book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, she describes how teenagers carefully curate their feeds based on the audience they are trying to reach.

Adolescents have been migrating away from Facebook and Twitter over the last few years, showing preference for sites like Snapchat, Whisper, Kik, and Secret that provide more anonymity and privacy. Part of this transition can be explained by the fact that the older social media sites stopped being cool when parents joined them, but perhaps another reason could be that teenagers growing up in the post-Snowden era implicitly understand the value of anonymity. For teens, it’s not a matter of which platform to use, but rather which works best in a particular context.

Right now in the U.S. it’s essentially the case that when you post information online, you give up control of it.

Some companies may give you that right, but you don’t have a natural, legal right to control your personal data. So if a company decides they want to sell it or market it or release it or change your privacy settings, they can do that.

The point is, we really don’t know how this information will be used. For instance, say I’m a merchant — once I get information about you, I can use this information to try to extract more economic surplus from the transaction. I can price-discriminate you, so that I can get more out of the transaction than you will.

I’m interested in working in this area, not because disclosure is bad — human beings disclose all the time, it’s an innate need as much as privacy is — but because we really don’t know how this information will be used in the long run.